Corpora: "Semantic Knowledge Acquisition and Categorisation" - Workshop at ESSLLI 2001

[Alessandro Lenci]

************************* CALL FOR PAPERS ******************************



SEMANTIC KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND CATEGORISATION

Workshop at ESSLLI XIII (Helsinki)

Helsinki, August 13th - 17th 2001

http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/~esslli

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The sheer amount of knowledge necessary to shed light on the way word
meanings mutually relate in context or distribute in lexico-semantic
classes appears to exceed the limits of human conscious awareness and
descriptive capability. Particularly at this level of linguistic
analysis, then, we seem to be in need of automatic ways of  filtering,
structuring and classifying semantic evidence through inspection of a
large number of word uses in context. Totally or partially unsupervised
inductive methods of knowledge acquisition from corpus data are credited
with being able to provide such ways. Yet, it remains to be seen how
acquired information can best be represented in current formal models
for knowledge representation, for it to be made available to mainstream
NLP applications.

There are reasons to believe that this integration will require much
more than a simple extension of off-the-shelf machine learning
technology. At the same time, any major breakthrough in this area is
bound to have significant repercussions on the way word meanings and
lexico-semantic classes in general are formally represented and used for
applications. With these purposes in mind, the workshop intends to focus
on the issue of interaction between techniques for inducing semantic
information from corpus data and formal methods of linguistic knowledge
representation. In particular, we encourage in-depth analysis of
underlying assumptions of the proposed techniques and methods and
discussion of possible relevant connections with cognitive,
linguistic,logical and philosophical issues.


TOPICS OF INTEREST

Possible themes for contributions are:

- development of 'data-driven' semantic type systems
- dynamic update and tuning of formal ontologies with text data
- 'hybrid models' of knowledge extraction, whereby machine learning
  methods are integrated with formal structures of knowledge
representation
- creation of dynamic lexical knowledge-bases
- formal representation and structuring of the flow of information
  extracted from texts.


WORKSHOP ORGANISATION

The workshop will be held on five subsequent days, August 13th-17th
2001. It will take place during the ESSLLI-Summer School in Helsinki,
and will be open to all members of the LLI-community, computational
linguistics and cognitive science as well. Each session will consist of
two talks plus discussion (30mins + 15mins each).
The workshop language will be English.

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GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS

The organizers welcome contributions from different fields of
computational
linguistics, logic and cognitive science.

1. Submissions will consist of full papers reporting on original,
   unpublished works. Papers should not exceed 5000 words
   (including references), must contain a 5-10 lines abstract, and must
   be submitted in postscript format

2. The reviewing of papers will be blind. Hence the paper
   should not include the authors' names and affiliations.
   Furthermore, self-references that reveal the author's identity
   should be avoided.

3. Identification information will be put in a separate file
   consisting of:
   Title of the paper:
   Author(s):
   Affiliation(s):
   E-mail(s):
   Abstract:

4. Submitted papers and identification information must be sent
   to the following address by MARCH 15th 2001:

   esslli2001 at ilc.pi.cnr.it

Accepted papers will be notified by APRIL 30th, together with the
comments of the reviewers.

The final version of the papers will be prepared in LaTeX by MAY 31st,
for publication in the Workshop proceedings. The stylesheet will be
circulated in due time.

Note that all workshop participants must register as participants
of ESSLLI. The early registration fees apply to authors of accepted
papers.

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IMPORTANT DATES

March  15th 2001 - Deadline for submitting papers
April  30th 2001 - Notification of acceptance
May    31st 2001 - Preparation of the final version of the paper
June   15th 2001 - Final program of the workshop
August 13th 2001 - The workshop begins
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PROGRAM COMMITEE

Ted Briscoe (Cambridge University, Cambridge, United Kingdom)
Nicoletta Calzolari (Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, CNR, Pisa,
Italy)
Christiane Fellbaum (Princeton University, Princeton, USA)
Ed Hovy (USC, Marina del Rey CA, USA)
Dekang Lin (University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada)
Antonio Sanfilippo (LingoMotors Inc., Cambridge MA, USA)
Piek Vossen (SAILLABS, Antwerpen, The Netherlands)


ORGANISING COMMITEE

Alessandro Lenci
Simonetta Montemagni
Vito Pirrelli

Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) - CNR
Area della Ricerca CNR
Via Alfieri 1 (San Cataldo)
I-56010 PISA
Italy


CONTACT ADDRESS

esslli2001 at ilc.pi.cnr.it

WEB: http://www.ilc.pi.cnr.it/~esslli